


Look Ahead, Deny It Later

by nekare



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-20
Updated: 2011-04-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:22:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekare/pseuds/nekare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's always been a psychic - he just never looked hard enough to see it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look Ahead, Deny It Later

Sam tries jerking his father awake, little hands on his father’s worn sleeve, on top of something that looks suspiciously like dried blood. “Dad, Daddy, please, wake up,” he mutters, knowing better than startling his father. There’s a knife under the pillow, after all.

“Sammy?” Comes his father’s groggy voice. Sam watches as John rubs his eyes, not quite awake. His dad’s just come back from a hunt, and if he hadn’t even had the energy to change out of his clothes, then it must have been really exhausting. Sam shifts a bit from foot to foot, suddenly feeling silly for being so childishly scared. He’s already seven, after all.

“I had a bad dream,” he says morosely, and he starts speaking fast before he loses his nerve. “There was a little girl, littler than me, and she got attacked by, uh, something, dunno what, and--”

His father lifts a hand, silencing him. “Calm down, buddy,” he says, his hand moving up to ruffle Sam’s hair even as his eyes are closing again. “It was just a dream, Sammy, don’t make anything out of it.” Hi voice gets lower until it’s nothing but a whisper. He must _really_ be tired then, and Dean’s the one that usually takes care of Dad at this times, but Sam still feels stupid from bothering his dad with such a simple thing.

John goes back to sleep with his hand still on top of Sam’s head, and Sam lets it drop to the mattress slowly, trying not to wake him up.

He climbs back into the bed he shares with Dean and buries himself under the blankets, curled around himself. He ends up hugging Dean’s bony knees, looking like just a bundle of blankets to the outside world. Dean mumbles angrily and kicks him in his sleep, but Sam refuses to let go. He’d like sleeping with Dad better – like Dean has told him he used to do before Mom had died, but Dad’s been busy killing nasty, evil things, and he deserves to rest, and it’s not like Dean kicks so hard, anyway.

He holds onto Dean’s legs hard enough to bruise, and the next day Dean complains all day long about having to share a bed with such a whiny and bothersome baby, at which Sam says, angry, that he is most _definitely_ not a baby, and Dean just lifts his eyebrow and says _Wanna bet?_ in that superior tone of his.

So they fight, and Dad makes them go with no dessert, and things are normal enough for Sam not to connect the dots when Dad’s next hunt is a werewolf that dismembered a little girl in Colorado.

\---

Baby Sammy has these huge, big eyes that make him look as if he can understand every single word that’s said around him. Bobby finds it strange, keeps on saying that it’s not normal for thirteen-months-old babies to pay so much attention to their surrounds, but Dean thinks it’s cool, having the smartest baby brother in the world. He tries showing the baby the letters of his name (cutting it to only three words to make it easier), but he’s not so good at writing yet, so he ends up just putting things in front of the baby and naming them. “This is an apple, Sammy, you get it? Aaaaapple.” Sammy giggles, and makes a spit bubble.

Dean used to do this ever since before Mom had gone away to heaven, but Dad no longer laughs and ruffles his hair, but instead smiles sadly at him, and holds them both in a lingering way, as if they were going to suddenly disappear. Dean misses Mom, they all laughed a lot more when she was still around.

No matter for how long he’s rocked before, or how warm his milk is, Sammy always, _always_ wakes up when Dad goes hunting. Even when Dad sneaks out, or mentions nothing beforehand, Sammy will always be restless and fussy during the day, crawling on the floor behind him, as if not wanting him out of his sight. Once Dad’s gone, he’ll stare at Dean for a moment, eyes wide and afraid, and then he’ll start bawling, hands fisted and little tears falling from his eyes. Bobby always tries helping, keeps on singing odd things in that language Dad told Dean is called Latin, but Sammy will only stop screaming when Dean holds him. Dean tells him stories, sings lullabies than only a few months before his mother used to sing to him, pats his back as if trying to warm him up.

Sammy never stops crying, though. He might stop screaming his lungs out, and he might not cover every surface (most likely Dean) with snot, but he keeps on sobbing, quietly, hiccupping every once in a while. Dean no longer fits in Sam’s crib, so he takes the baby to his own bed, where they wait, awake, for their father to return. It’s as if Sammy could sense Dad is danger, because he’ll only stop crying when their father enters Bobby’s house, sweaty and tired, and then, when they’re finally all under the same room, he’ll give this tiny sigh and go to sleep.

Sometimes, Dean wants to take advantage of it, make Dad stop going out at night because clearly, Sammy doesn’t want him gone, and neither does Dean, because deep down, he’s terrified that one night his father won’t come home, and then he and Sammy will really be all alone.

But Dad has this glassy look in his eyes that he never used to have, and Dean has heard him more than once talk to Mom, as if expecting she’ll talk back, and he thinks that even if he asked nicely, and used Sammy to get his point across, Dad wouldn’t listen to him anyway.

\---

Sam dreams about a young, blonde girl with a wicked smile since he’s nine, all smiles and warm neck to bury his nose in. It’s odd, at first, waking up contented and warm after a lifetime of odd nightmares, but when your family hunts undead things for a living (no, wait, not even for that), one gets used to odd (and weird. And strange. And particular, extravagant, outrageous and downright wrong).

He never gets to hear her name, although she mouths it over and over again for him, and Dean stares at him when he finds him in this month’s school library, going through ‘The Big Book of Baby Names’ and whispering each of them, trying to figure out if one of them fits with the way the girl’s breath feels on his skin whenever she says it. Her features, too, are a mystery for him, perfectly clear in his dreams only to become foggy the minute he wakes up.

Mostly, he keeps quiet about it, but he can’t help it if he sometimes lets a few things slip, like _Hey, the girl in my dreams says I should really learn how to cook, that even my cereal ends up soggy,_ and _The girl in my dreams doesn’t like apple juice, even though I keep telling her what a horrible mistake she’s making._ Dean keeps on giving him this odd, confused looks, but Dad has taken to say nothing at all and just tense whenever he starts a sentence with those words.

It’s always that, The Girl in My Dreams, practically capitalized, and he doesn’t know in which way he means it anymore.

As he eases into puberty, the dreams become more real, tangible, and he can feel himself (it _has_ to be himself, even if his limbs are too long and there’s hair covering his eyes) make the girl gasp, sigh in pleasure. It’s thrilling, and mouth-watering, and oh so damn embarrassing whenever he has to lock himself in the bathroom right after waking up. He wishes he could remember Dean going through the same thing, instead of having to endure his knowing smirk during long days in the car.

“The blonde girl in my dreams smells like this deodorant,” Sam says with his eyes bright, pointing at one of the stalls of the store, smiling a bit with the memory. He doesn’t get the _Whatever, son,_ he expects, but instead, both Dad and Dean turn sharply to look at him, their expressions far too serious, looking odd in the middle of the crowded convenience store. “What?” he asks when they stay still, Dean with three boxes of cereal in his arms, and Dad holding a grocery basket with a far too strong grip.

“Nothing,” his dad finally says, and they pay and leave and hunt and don’t talk about it.

Dean finally pushes him aside when he’s thirteen, and puts a photo of Mom holding him as a baby in Sam’s hands. “That’s Mom,” he says. He sits next to Sam in Sam’s bed, moving his homework aside unceremoniously.

“Yes Dean, I _have_ seen photos of her before.” Sam says with the tone of someone fed up of being treated like a little boy. “What about it?”

“Okay, please tell me that you’re not doing sick things to Mom in your dreams. _Please_ ,” he says, looking shifty.

Sam frowns, confused. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The dreams, Sammy, your disturbing-sounding dreams about blonde ladies, for Christ sake.” Dean says, sounding exasperated. “ _That’s_ what I’m talking about.”

“But Dean -- I’ve never dreamt about Mom.”

“You haven’t?”

“Not that I remember, at least,” Sam says with a shrug. He somewhat resents that, that he doesn’t have memories of Mom to even dream about her.

“Then what’s all that talk about blondes in your dreams? ‘Cause really, if you’ve been subjecting us to your wet dreams for years, there’ll be hell for you to pay, you hear me?”

Deny, deny, deny, says Sam’s mind, but then he finally gets it. “Wait, you thought I was dreaming of Mom in _that_ way?” He asks, managing to look horrified of both the idea and Dean himself. “What kind of sick person are you?”

“And Dad too. You get our worry now? Anyway, don’t change the subject.”

Sam looks down, kicks the floor with his old sneaker. He finally speaks, in a tiny, tiny vice, “I think it’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

Dean laughs in his face.

“Dude, I’m serious!”

“Ah, Sammy, you’re seriously messed up,” Dean says still laughing hysterically, holding his belly as he punches the mattress beside his legs in mirth.

“Oh, fuck you. In my dreams, I’m taller than you, anyway,” Sam says sullenly, starting to pick up his homework.

“Yeah, like you’ll _ever_ be taller than me, baby brother,” Dean says still laughing, and Sam just pushes him until Dean falls off the bed, and then he goes to the kitchen to see if he can get some peace and quiet to finish his homework. No such luck, though, he can still hear Dean’s laughter through the thin walls.

Sam almost manages to forget all about it, but when he meets Jess, it’s almost as if he had known her for his entire life.

\---

When he’s four, Sammy gets an imaginary friend.

It’s always _Sally this_ and _Sally that_ , and he drives Dean up the wall whenever he goes into his _Sally doesn’t like it so I don’t either,_ phases whenever Dean has to cook for him.

Sam gets prissy and moody about the stupidest things, like whenever Dean forgets to offer ‘Sally’ a part of his chocolate bar or when he rolls over on the bed and ‘crushes Sally’.

Their dad laughs at it at first, says it’s cute (which is an entire level of wrong when coming out of John Winchester’s mouth), and he claims that it wasn’t as if Dean hadn’t had an imaginary friend himself, so he’d just have to cope.

Dean remembers Tom alright, the little blue kid he had created for himself and that had suffered a lonesome death after Sammy had been born, but he clearly remembers he didn’t wait outside the bathroom for Tom to take a shower.

So he just glares whenever Sam sits on the floor and does puzzles by himself, when he chatters up the empty space beside him on the backseat of the Impala.

It lasts for months, until even his dad starts wondering if all that moving around isn’t affecting him. Dean just shakes his head at that, though, says it’s something different.

It’s not until Sammy starts knowing things he _definitely_ shouldn’t that they both start actually worrying.

“Sally says she misses her house -- the cotton plantation used to look so pretty on the mornings, and that she used to play in the fields and get lost in them, and by nights, she would sneak out through her window to watch the servants in their little cabin, dancing in the candlelight and singing in some weird language,” he says, and Dean and his dad frown at each other from the front seat.

“Sally says one of her maids once taught her how to make a doll out of hair and nail clippings, and Sally says it was really funny looking but she never showed it to her mommy. Can I have a toy like that too, Dad? I mean, not a doll, ‘cause that’s for girls, but what about a truck made out of hair? Can I?” Sam asks with apple pie in his mouth, spitting crumbs in the process. John curls his lips, trying to figure out what to say, and even while Dean is still worried, he manages to give his father an _I told you so,_ smirk.

“Sally says Atta, her nanny, used to have these pretty necklaces with a thousand beads that would crash into each other and make tinkly noises wherever she walked. Atta once invited Sally to the cabin, for one of the singing parties, and she says there were lots of drums and a noisy chicken, and they sang some more and one of the men grabbed a knife and did something and then everything was stained red and the chicken wasn’t making noise anymore. Sally says the red thing looked really pretty with the candlelight, but her new dress got ruined,” four year old Sammy says, all wide, innocent eyes, and Dean can feel every hair on his body standing on end. From the way his father’s jaw is set, he probably must be feeling the same.

They research, his dad looking more on edge than ever since Mom died, and they have to retrace their steps a few states back until the reach the outskirts or Louisiana.

They salt and burn the body of the dead little girl from a century back that has been haunting Sam for five months already, as he sleeps in the Impala with Dad’s jacket on top of him as a make-shift blanket.

Sam never has another imaginary friend, although he says how much he misses Sally from time to time.

To the day, Dean has never, ever, fucked a girl named Sally.

\---

When Sam is seventeen, and Dean is twenty-one, after a hunt that had left them all tired like never before, Sam dreams of fire and bright, yellow eyes and an ever-changing face, dark smirk framing it. Dean’s bleeding onto his pillow from a gash on his forehead beside him, his heart beating too quickly from the cheap analgesic he had taken to numb the pain.

Their father is far too deeply asleep due to the loss of blood, too silent when his snores are usually a constant in their lives. He has kicked the covers aside, and the red-stained bandages around his leg are visible in the moonlight.

Sam is filled with bruises, so many that he had said, trying and failing to joke, that it was more like a giant bruise than a myriad of purple stains on his skin. No one had laughed.

Sam dreams, on the night of the seventeenth anniversary of his mother’s death, and as his breathing goes labored and his eyes get scrunched up, every single object in the room rises an inch up in the air, just hovering there, Dean’s watch swaying with the wind from the open window, the shirt that Sam had abandoned on the end of the bed brushing the ground lightly, as the bed balances in the air. Sam doesn’t wake up. The dream shifts from shivering-inducing to some sort of a remix of that time he thought signing up for a musical at school would be a good idea.

Not one of the three Winchester men feel anything, and by the time he wakes up, Sam has already forgotten all about the dream.


End file.
